Thursday, March 27, 2008

I found both YouTube and podcasting attractive. I think that podcasting has more possiblities for use on an academic library website as a tool to give assistance to students with questions about databases or how to build a search query on a particular topic. I can see myself creating podcasts to address these types of topics. I believe that there are useful videos on YouTube which could be incorporated into a course, particularly when one wants to move students out of the typical text box.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

I find Facebook more inviting than Myspace. Facebook treats one as an adult who can be networking for a variety of different reasons. Myspace seems to assume that the individual is single and looking for a "love" interest. Facebook is an appropriate place for a library to provide links to encourage students to navigate to the library website for information resources.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Wikis can be very useful for a group to collaboratively develop policies, procedures or reports. Wikis avoid the concern about whether one is working on the most recent version of a document. Wikis can be limited to the group actually working on the document, so others cannot post or even see what is being written. If a wiki remains open to anyone who stumbles across it, the content may be completely changed which may be a good or bad thing depending upon the purpose of the wiki and the changes which are made. Currently I'm involved with a number of groups using wikis to work on very different tasks - evaluate course management systems, develop criteria to evaluate job candidates and develop a report analyzing a document and how an association might respond to that document. I think that as people become more familiar with wikis and less intimidated by them, they will prefer using a wiki rather than scheduling and attending multiple meetings. At the university we are just beginning our regional accreditation self-study. Perhaps we should be thinking about using wikis to develop the different chapters of that self-study.

Friday, March 7, 2008

As a professional cataloger, I deeply appreciate the ability to tag as a way of identifying materials on the same subject. I believe that del.icio.us is an excellent way to group websites which can be shared with others in a classroom or other setting. This approach is much better than bookmarking in a browser because of the ability to group similar websites. Also, there isn't the worry of losing the bookmarks when you upgrade your computer or accessing bookmarks when using a different computer. Technorati provides a similar application for blogs.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

My Rollyo search engine is on Mystery writers and is located at http://rollyo.com/ddcasey19 . Rollyo can be useful for students or faculty who are researching a particular topic. The link to My LibraryThing is www.librarything.com/catalog/ddcasey19. This application is useful for book readers and collectors. It will keep me from buying duplicate copies of books. Also, it could be used by libraries to highlight new acquisitions or small special collections. Here is my image of a chocolate bar. I'm not sure how I would use the image generator.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

The RSS feed allows new postings to be brought together in the blog reader, so the user only has to go to one website, the blog reader, to find out what's new on all of the different blogs to which he/she is subscribed. With bookmarks the user must go to each blog site to find out what's new. Also, because the blog reader is on the web rather than stored on the hard drive of a particular computer, a person can access their blog reader from any computer. Moreover, when it's time to upgrade to a new computer, the user doesn't need to worry about losing or transfering bookmarks.

Using Google's Blog Search, I was able to easily locate blogs on a variety of topics.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

I will use Flickr for family photos, so I can share them with family across the country. However, I will limit access to friends and family. I used the Flickr anywhere and found it interesting. However, it's much larger than the blog format.